Poster
So what exactly is The Ring anyways? The movie poster suggests that it’s
an archetypal loop—a sort of apocalyptic eclipse or thorny ringlet
as imagined by your run-of-the-mill medieval witch-burner: a bleak and
fiery loop, godily mysterious and gaudily spare (and, you gradually notice,
just a little bit hairy). Perhaps, the film occasionally suggests, the
ring is just a shape—the eye of a horse, the closing lid of a well,
or the wet imprint left by the bottom of a cup? Or maybe a ring is only
the sound a phone makes. This title pun—whose ambivalence implies
both a common household appliance and Wagner—belies a movie that
is willing to be at once more clever and more stupid than it actually
is.

Movie Trailer
So my mom took me to see The Ring, a new, thoroughly creepy horror movie
whose tagline admonishes, “Before you die, you see the ring.”
We’re supposed to be terrified, but the first fact—that the
person trail-blazing into the theater was my mom, with me trailing behind
her—is actually far more shocking than the second. In one corner,
you have my mom, a vegetarian who collects beanie babies and cute dogs;
her favorite movie is The Burmese Harp, an anti-war meditation about a
Buddhist monk who vows to bury all the dead left over from the second
World War; her favorite religion is a combination of Buddhism, Christianity,
and whatever form of compassion she can invent today. In the other corner,
you have The Ring, a movie about a videotape that kills you if you watch
it. The two main characters must unearth the tape’s unearthly secrets
before their own time runs out!

So why did my mom want to see The Ring? While we were going back home
from the theater, going back and forth as per the usual post-movie car
commentary, she mentioned that the commercial for The Ring reminded her
of Sixth Sense (The Ring, incidentally, has a similarly superficial fascination
with numbers—the characters have seven days to live after watching
the tape, almost as if to one-up its predecessor). The images in the commercials,
she said, seemed striking—almost artistic. Her answer is telling:
The Ring is a movie about both of these things: our familiarity with Sixth
Sense and our understanding of images themselves.

It is also a movie about moms.

Feature Attraction
The movie begins by dropping us, seemingly in media res, in a bedroom
straight out of the increasingly decrepit genre of the teen thriller.
There, of course, we see two boringly catty teenage girls—pretty
but never really glamorous—who talk about guys and inevitably find
the usual terror in phone calls at night, kitchens bereft of mom and dad,
and the sort of narrative hoaxing so common in these types of thrillers
(The creepy phone call? It was only mom!). One girl tells another that
she’s heard of a video tape that kills you if you watch it. The
tape is watched. The creepiness ensues. This is just like Urban Legend,
your brain says (assuming that your brain would think of a specific movie
rather than the entire foggy genre itself). Luckily for us (and unluckily
for them), the movie quickly forgets these girls—almost as if to
imply that it is leaving their genre (the teen thriller) and its undignified
twistiness behind. This kind of genre-surfing is The Ring’s favorite
kind of bait-and-switch. The movie is actually about the other side of
the switchboard—not the teenage girls (whose horror and social life
are inextricably tied to the cordless phone) but the nagging voice on
the other end of the line. That’s right—The Ring is a teen
thriller whose main character is mom!

This opening scene foreshadows two aesthetic facts that will come to dominate
and even overwhelm the film. First, the way The Ring begins by signifying
one genre and ends by signifying another shows us that it’s not
just a horror movie—it’s also a kind of opera of the sign,
a movie whose main talent isn’t scariness but in throwing out complex
webs of interconnected meanings. The second—and more aesthetically
interesting—of these facts is the aforementioned mom: The Ring stars
the surprisingly beautiful Naomi Watts—by which I mean that you
are always surprised by her prettiness; her good looks are inexplicable:
unlike most Hollywood actresses, Watts gives you the simultaneous awareness
of how glamorous she is and (though occasionally over-glamorous) of how
much she seems just like the assertively normal yet always abnormally
distressed character she plays. How do these two facts tie together?

On the narrative level—at the risk of sounding rather “plot
summary” about the whole thing—The Ring doesn’t really
start until Naomi Watts walks on the screen. The two girls have watched
the fateful tape (cf. first paragraph)—one dies and the other seems
just about on the brink. Naomi Watts plays the aunt of one of the two
girls and, in order to stuff her as full of motivation as possible, also
plays an investigative journalist (this being Hollywood, she is of course
a gutsy and glitzy journalist in the Lois Lane mold). Watts—or as
the people call her onscreen, Rachel Keller—makes one of the those
clever decisions without which horror movies would simply cease to exist:
she tracks down the tape and watches it herself. The phone rings. She
learns that she will die in a week if she doesn’t solve the puzzle
of the tape. (Note, here is motivation number three: her life). Images
from the tape slowly poke their way into her world. She sees a horse go
insane and leap off the edge of a ferry. She sees a tree flame in red.
The ominous omens pile on top of the main characters—their insistence
can only signal Rachel Keller’s impending end. Keller’s investigations
lead her to delve into the lives of a dead mother and her insufficiently
dead child (hint: she’s the ghost that created the tape) and gradually
the symbols stop seeming surrealist and begin seeming biographical, even
Freudian. It is the protagonists’ job to find out what these symbols
mean, how they mean. Rachel Keller, then, isn’t just a journalist—she’s
a semiotician; and The Ring, then, is only superficially a horror
movie. Sure, it’s sometimes perfectly willing to dispense with characterization
if it has the chance to bash us over the heads and it always chooses to
bash us with the usual accoutrements of Hollywood horror: the large clunky
sounds; the camera slowly creeping in, as though to suggest the blandly
ominous first-person perspective of the next scene’s monster creeping
up; blue-veined faces; and, in one scene, unintentionally terrifying feet.
All of these elements of direct horror occur only on the movie’s
surface. In fact, the movie’s closest cousin isn’t Nightmare
on Elm Street or Urban Legend—it’s Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49! Like Pynchon’s postmodern classic, The Ring
centers on a heroine’s quest to track a symbol (the shape of a ring)
by close-reading the world. In both works, the ultimate meaning of the
symbol is either debatable or pointless—what matters isn’t
the explanation (we are never told what the sign means or where it came
from, in either works) but the idea of explaining it, the quest of tracing
it back into some kind of meaning rather than the meaning of any symbol
itself.

Watts became a star in a David Lynch comeback (Mulholland Drive) and now
follows that up with The Ring, a David Lynch appropriation. If parody
can be likened to a fun house mirror, an image that reflects another image
while distorting it, then the shape of appropriation is more like a box.
Like Hamlet, whose internal play paraphrases the play around it, The Ring
is and is about a movie within a movie, a box within a box. That is to
say, The Ring is two movies: the first is a film about good-looking actors
looking intense and looking intensely at a scratchy film clip. The second
movie is the clip they watch, stocked with images half avant-garde, half
film school: centipedes scratching across a white floor, a girl (her head
buried in hair) reflected in a hallway mirror, a woman jumping off a cliff.
(The Ring slyly insulates itself from the more clichéd aspects
of this tape through kitsch. It’s opening scene grounds the tape
in a far more belief-suspending genre (teen slasher flicks) and when one
character initially sees the film, he preemptively dismisses it: it looks
kind of like a student film, he says.) The movie’s outside is Hollywood;
its inside is David Lynch.

Unfortunately, no one bothered to inform the main characters about this.
The two endearingly generic main characters are problem-solvers (Rachel
Keller and her estranged husband), they are Hollywood characters who increasingly
find themselves on the David Lynch side of the tracks, a world deformed
beyond the simple two-part structure of problem and solution. These two
heroes awkwardly collide with ficelle characters straight out of Dan Clowes’s
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron: an archive manager with his own slanted
logic; the motel owner who seems somehow stoned; the surviving teenage
girl sans make-up; basically, weirdoes who are suppose to be threateningly
idiosyncratic, but lain against the more direct horror of bleeding phones
and burning hands, they almost come off as quirky sitcom characters. The
main characters don’t seem to realize it, but these interactions
have the cross-paradigm awkwardness that occurs whenever two people from
completely different ideologies accidentally bump into each other and
struggle to find something to talk about (a liberal and a conservative
on politics, a Christian and an atheist on religion, etc.). What is the
main characters’ ideology? Reason.

As you would expect of a mystery, The Ring is a drama of reason. It is
also a drama of unreason: the characters nail together clues and evidence,
as in every year’s mystery, but find that their rickety construction
leads nowhere. This is surrealism, Hollywood style, where what’s
most terrifying is the possible fallibility of analysis: the ultimate
shock doesn’t come from the grimace of rubber faces but from the
realization that it is the clues that seem to stretch in the wrong directions.

The Ring is a movie of stretchy clues: the clues come from the rational
deduction and pacing of a Hollywood mystery, the significatory stretchiness
comes from the opposite—the dreamy terror, the anti-reason of the
surrealists. The old surrealists—those who were earnest about their
surrealism—shook us through the terror of signs: images that had
no answers, riddles whose solutions had enigmatically vanished. Bunuel
subjected us to a razor slashing open a human eye. Lynch’s Eraserhead
taught us to watch a woman with a honeycomb-shaped head, dancing in a
radiator. The visual shock of these images is exacerbated by how the images
float out of nowhere, contextually adrift, and connect to nowhere. We
expect the images to mean something but they never seem to signify outside
of their own shock. We find ourselves unable to trace them back into their
explanations. The Ring is somewhat less naïve: it says that we should
be more cynical than to believe that images should lead anywhere, when,
depending on the reader, they lead everywhere. The film’s most beautiful
images (and it’s worth noting how few critics have noted how sleekly
beautiful The Ring often is) seem surrealist: a ladder extending up to
the second level of a barn (and it seems, to heaven); the evening light
shooting through the red leaves of a tree, lighting up the interior of
a cabin in reds; screws levitating out of the ground. (Perhaps to show
off its surrealist street cred, The Ring seems to have lifted these floating
screws out of an animated short by the American puppet-masters The Brothers
Quay.) Each image is annotated by the reaction of the observing character,
whose creased analytic brow functions as an asterisk to the following
thought: What does this mean?

In most cases, the answer is that the images mean many, often contradictory
things. For all its moodiness, The Ring is a thoroughly ironic movie and
it has a terrifying ambivalence: it says one thing and means another.
It does this in two ways. First, the film swings back and forth syntactically,
changing its structure from one genre to another. Secondly, on a semantic
or ‘specific’ level, the film continually alters the exact
meaning of its own vocabulary: an image means one thing in one scene and
then suddenly another in another scene.

The previews themselves—as my mother noted—already work on
the first, structural level: they address our memory of clichéd
narratives. When the previews show us the prerequisite spooky child delightfully
informing us that “Everyone will suffer,” you’re almost
inclined to snicker or even throw back your head, laughing, as if to say
“Didn’t we get over this in the late Eighties?” But
what makes The Ring compelling is how it’s built on the terror of
intimation, not intimidation—it scares us with metaphors rather
than monsters. If this sounds familiar, then you’re right to think
of Sixth Sense, the M. Night Shyamalan film that The Ring rips-off, parodies,
and finally deconstructs. Sixth Sense discovered that mood could be as
affecting—as terrifying—as any of the spectacles we traditionally
associate with horror movies. This is why Sixth Sense feels secretly anachronistic
and slightly European: it’s a horror movie whose closest precedent
is Henry James. “We are tired of violence; we suspect mystery,”
Virginia Woolf wrote. “Henry James’s ghost stories have nothing
in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains,
the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons.
They have their origin within us.” (Woolf, Virginia. Rainbow and
Granite. 67, 71.) A horror movie about a child with his own psychologist
and a tough guy who’s no longer able to talk to his wife, Sixth
Sense reminded American movies of an universal commonplace: the terrors
of the family are far more existentially unnerving than the terror of
terror itself. As a result of this realization, Sixth Sense sketched out
a new kind of supernatural threat—an image of human sorrow rather
than supernatural evil, a particularly East Asian sense of a ghost, one
might say, rather than a Western sense of a devil:

When we read that (the late Tang Dynasty poet)
Li Ho was called a kuei ts’ai, a ghostly or daemonic genius,
and notice his apparently familiar constellation of pessimism, voluptuousness,
aestheticism, and an imagination haunted by dark forces, it is tempting
to read him as a nineteenth-century Satanist. But the Western sense of
evil of course assumes a Christian background, and the kuei of
Li Ho’s poems are generally not devils but ghosts, sad rather than
malevolent beings. (Graham, A.C. Poems of the Late T’ang.
91-92.)

The ghosts in Sixth Sense are almost fleshless; their scariness
is not in their physical manifestations but in their emotional ones. They
are not so much devils—like Freddy or Jason—but humans who
are mourning their own deaths. If these ghosts scare us, it’s because
they are half human rather than half horror—the scariest thing about
them is how they are doomed to be themselves. These question of ghosts
can only be solved not through violence and heroism but through the far
quieter art of empathy.

Seemingly sleepwalking in the wake of Sixth Sense, The Ring has mastered
all the symptoms of a Sixth Sense-type movie: the mood is spooky and the
walls are green; the underlying rift in its world seems to be the main
characters’ divorce as much as the ghostly premonitions. (The film
mirrors the family structure of the three heroes with the more tragic
family revealed in the newspaper clippings, as if to suggest that the
only way to overcome a ghost is to wall it off with a family. In fact,
in another example of tricky re-signification, Rachel Keller’s son
draws a picture of a mother and father holding hands with a son. We are
led to believe that this first refers to the son’s longing for family.
We later learn that the scribble is only documentary: it is a picture
of the ghost’s family.) And, like Sixth Sense, these two parents
are so stuck in their world of deadlines and career opportunities, that
they seem to miss an entire otherworldly domain of intuition, a world
accessible only to their child (who like Haley Joel Osment in Sixth Sense
has been puffed up with all the relevant spookiness). The underlying punchline
of this movie is the same as in the opening scene: The Ring signifies
one kind of movie and then swiftly becomes another. It tells us that it
is Sixth Sense, rather than Nightmare on Elm Street—a movie of classy
suspense, rather than shock. It tells us that we are dealing with Chinese
ghosts rather than Western demons. And then it pulls the rug under us.

If we expected it to be anything more than formulaic, the movie wouldn’t
work: it has sneakily used our overwhelmingly low expectation of Hollywood
movies against us—it already assumes that we will underestimate
it. This is aesthetic camouflage in both directions—The Ring is
both a surrealist art house film slumming as a Hollywood flick and a reliably
creepy Hollywood movie that pretends to be more than it actually is. Most
cunningly, it reminds us that the characters in horror movies only resort
to helping ghosts out of self-interest: it isn’t so much that they
want to converse with spirits—doing so is merely the most efficient
way of staying alive. Once we know this, we realize that, in movies like
Sixth Sense and The Ring, the plots and emotions are almost as fake and
computer-generated as the ghosts themselves. The ease with which The Ring
deconstructs the Beyond The Grave Therapy school of horror (started a
decade ago by Ghost, revived by The Sixth Sense, and consolidated by The
Others), makes it a movie that is more knowing, but more shallow. That
is to say, The Ring is shallow in the way that a movie like The Usual
Suspects is shallow: it wants to be as cool as a plot twist, rather than
as deep as a wound.

A plot twist is the most amusing form re-signification—it says that
one signified future will be replaced by another less overt future, the
way a train crossing might switch the curve of a track so the train proceeds
on suddenly altered rails. The Ring’s plot twist works because it
gets us used to a Sixth Sense-style drama and then delivers an old fashioned
schlock fest in the final scene. The Ring also tricks us on a smaller
more semantic level—the level of specific images rather than entire
genres. This is a movie that’s creepy at a distance and is about
that distance—not just the distance between the main characters
and their deaths, but also the vulnerable space between what metaphors
signify and the metaphors themselves. TV sets suddenly turn on all on
their own, like echoes that echo no original sound. We never find out
what show the ghost wanted to catch so badly, but when Naomi Watts wonders,
lip-bitingly pensive, what foul creature would want to send out such nightmarish
images into the world, we are tempted to think she’s describing
the horrific images of The Ring itself.

Its images scare us by unlinking a signified from one signifier to another.
Rachel Keller, for example, finds herself scribbling out the faces of
photographs without even noticing she’s doing it—almost as
if she’s possessed. The scribbled halo initially seems to be an
emanation of death; later we learn that the images are a repressed memory:
the pencil marks aren’t an abstract symbol of annihilation but wet
hair clinging to a drowned girl’s face. In another scene, a character
is about to die and the phone rings in the background as loud as a stock
horror movie cliché. It is of course only Naomi Watts on the other
end of the line. To the character being called, the phone call is ringed
with connotations of horror movie creepiness. The character who is calling,
however, believes that she’s making the action movie call that saves
the day, the governor’s last second ring to death row. Their problem
isn’t ghosts—it’s genres! That is to say, their problem
is in attaching two conflicting signifieds to the same signifier.

The movie echoes with other small descriptions of sign wackiness. Those
who have watched the tape—and are consequently marked for death—find
their faces smeared out and distorted in photographs, as though only the
photographs’ incorrect significations are honest enough to represent
the characters’ encroaching ghostliness. In one scene, a fly creeps
out from a television screen and into the air, suggesting that supernatural
powers are all it takes to get unstuck out of signification and into a
signified. The movie ends with Rachel Keller copying the tape to show
to someone else. I would like to suggest, tongue-in-cheekly, that this
finale, a scene on the ethics of seeing, is basically the most chilling
warning about video piracy ever put to film. And what is video piracy
but the re-signification (copying a video) of something that is already
a signifier (a video)?

The Ring’s sign language—tangled up like old yarn—makes
one wonder how we ever manage to find any clear meaning in life. Contrary
to the surrealists, who avoided signification altogether, the creepiest
images in The Ring scare not through their overt mystery but through their
overabundance of possible meanings; they are clues, portents and omens,
and the irrevocability with which they suggest the protagonists’
own fate seem to weigh down each scene. Unlike the surrealists, The Ring
has not declared war on meaning—it merely knows meaning so well
that it dreads it. The links lead everywhere, overwhelming ubiquitous
and their complexity seems to overwhelm human logic. The Ring’s
terror is the realization that, even in the moments the count the most,
we will not be able to differentiate between a symbol that means nothing
and a symbol that means everything.

Commentary
We got home and my mom started cooking dinner in the kitchen. I went to
the other room to check my e-mail and when I came back through the living
room, I found the TV on to an early play-off game. I went into the kitchen
and said to my mother, who was stirring something pasta-like into a pot:
“So are you a football fan now?”

“What do you mean?”

“The TV. It’s on.”

“No,” she said. “I thought you were watching.”

“Oh. It must have just turned on by itself.” I paused and
then smiled. “It’s just like the movie!”